An Intelligent Graph Edit Distance-Based Approach for Finding Business Process Similarities

There are numerous application areas of computing similarity between process models. It includes finding similar models from a repository, controlling redundancy of process models, and finding corresponding activities between a pair of process models. The similarity between two process models is computed based on their similarity between labels, structures, and execution behaviors. Several attempts have been made to develop similarity techniques between activity labels, as well as their execution behavior. However, a notable problem with the process model similarity is that two process models can also be similar if there is a structural variation between them. However, neither a benchmark dataset exists for the structural similarity between process models nor there exist an effective technique to compute structural similarity. To that end, we have developed a large collection of process models in which structural changes are handcrafted while preserving the semantics of the models. Furthermore, we have used a machine learning-based approach to compute the similarity between a pair of process models having structural and label differences. Finally, we have evaluated the proposed approach using our generated collection of process models.